Superbyte 2013

Last year we attended our first ever Megabyte night in Manchester. Poisoncut was playing a live set, and I got to enjoy a night of chiptunes, fun people, amusing visuals and retro sweets. But not all nights end in a hangover and a hankering for toast, this one was the start of something more. Following a couple more outings to Megabyte, in September 2012 we attended the first ever Superbyte Festival in Manchester. We ran a Retroid Studio stall, taking it in turns to go see our fave artists and do a tea run. It was a great event in an awesome venue, we thoroughly enjoyed it. Not too long after this, the organisers were already planning for Superbyte 2013 (it’s a full time job this festival planning malarkey and the early bird catches the worm!), and we were lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to design the Superbyte 2013 promotional items. This includes posters, leaflets, a programme, banner and web assets. The work is currently ongoing, but we have completed the poster, which has indeed been printed – so keep an eye out for them around the North West!

We’ll be back to show you the other items currently being worked on very soon!

Chief Tea Maker

Do you have someone in your office that makes the best brew? C’mon, we know you have, there’s always on person who manages to get it ‘just right’! Why not show your appreciation of their excellent tea making abilities by buying them this poster to display proudly by their desk?! Available in our Etsy shop now, there will be more posters coming soon!

Self Intiated Posters

Every now and then designers get an opportunity to do some self initiated work. I had just that a few weeks ago, and I decided I would produce a series of posters using my own photography. I wanted to create something that had a vintage vibe with a ‘used film’ effect to compliment the photography. When putting the pieces together I found that the first poster I did had quite a playful theme to it in the images I had picked – a toy robot, a helter skelter, a little character putting his tongue out flying an aeroplane. A quote came to mind: “It’s Just a Ride”. I added this quote to the poster, made a few final tweaks, and went about creating the next one, only this time, specifically picking photos I knew would fit around another quote that I liked: “The Journey Of A Thousand Miles Begins With Just One Step”. I’m really happy with the first two posters in this series and I will no doubt be making more:

Both are available to purchase as A3 prints in our Etsy shop, do keep a look out for more coming soon!

I’ll be back soon with a blog post about some of my favourite graphic design pieces, until then, take care!

Lyndsey x

Come and have a go…

…if you think you’re BARD enough.
No, we’re not inviting you to come have fistycuffs with us and hammering out a b instead of an h on the keyboard in the process, thankfully, as we’re rubbish at fighting. What we’re actually on about is an upcoming play at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool. As part of the Liverpool Shakespeare Festival, in association with Lodestar and Liverpool City Council ‘Hamlet – Come and Have a Go If You Think You’re Bard Enough’ is a very exciting sounding version of the famous play whereby many different theatre companies and actors at all different stages in their careers come to together for the performance – with not one rehearsal beforehand. Madness you might say! But by all accounts when a similar thing was done in 2011 it made for  fabulous, often amusing, highly entertaining watching, and we’ve had the pleasure of designing their poster and show programme.

One of the folks involved in organising the performance found this image of “Sgt Shakespeare” and thought it would be the perfect image to use on the poster. So, they got in touch with Robert Carter, the artists who created this wonderful painting and asked for permission to use it. Robert gave permission, so it was then up to us to create the poster for the show, the outcome of which is shown above. We wanted to make sure the information was clearly visible, so it couldn’t just be text straight onto the painting as there would be to much going on. That said, we didn’t want to put big blocks of white space and obscure too much of the painting as it really needed to be the central focus and we didn’t want to cut any of it off. The solution we came to meant that we used the space at the top for the title and then all additional info would be placed in complimentary colour boxes not much bigger than the text itself. We think it works really well and has great impact.
If you would like to see more of Robert’s amazing work then check out his website: www.crackedhat.com

We are currently still working on the show programme but will be sure to show you once it is finished! Do come along if you’re in Liverpool, we’ll certainly be there!

 

EDIT: UNFORTUNATELY THIS SHOW HAS NOW BE CANCELLED. We’re hoping this isn’t the last we’ll hear from CAHAG events though, it sounded like it was going to be really good :’(

ScrumbleShip

Quite a while ago now, Poisoncut, our resident sound creator, was approached by a game developer to create some music and sound effects for their newest game., Scrumbleship. Never one to turn down a chance to make some game music, and excited and perplexed at the idea of making sound effects for things such as two cubes made from butter slapping together, Poisoncut set to work our four tracks plus various sounds. The game isn’t finished yet, but the tracks are, so we thought we would share with you the melodic delights to be the soundtrack to your Bank Holiday Weekend (well, the sun sure ain’t showing it’s face so you’ll need something to perk you up!) – click on the image below to be taken to the soundtrack on Poisoncut’s Soundcloud:

Click on the image to be taken to the ScrumbleShip Soundtrack on Poisoncuts SoundCloud page.

If you would like to keep up to date with the progress of the game development then visit the ScrumbleShip website. We will have a word with them about their use of, dare we say it, Comic Sans… ;p

It’s been over a year?!

Oh my! We can’t believe it’s been over a year since our last blog post, how time flies! Fear not, we’re not gone, we’ve just been so busy with various projects both design and none design orientated that blogging (forgive us) has not been at the top of the priorities. But we’ll be back onto it from now on, we promise
We have just finished a website for a Liverpool based wedding singer, Brian Woods. Brian is also a Simply Red impersonator, and so the website needed to promote both acts. Other requirements included a music player, a gallery, a testimonials page which could be regularly updated and a videos page on which Brian could upload videos of the events he sings at. We also designed his business cards, roll up banners and poster so now he has a really good set of marketing materials which are in-keeping with his website.

We’ve really enjoyed working with Brian and we wish him the best of success, do go have a listen if you have the time, he has a cracking voice! So, what’s next? Well, currently we’re working on a very interesting project for a student theatre performance. We won’t say much more than that for now as we wouldn’t like to spoil it, but do keep an eye open for what’s coming up in the Liverpool Royal Court Theatre around Autumn time!

Twitchpack

Kaplow! That’s how all of my attempts at playing this game have ended, it’s a real challenging little task of a flash game but nevertheless, addictive. And of course you get to listen to some cool music courtesy of our resident music producer Poisoncut whilst you do. But remember, if you’re skiving from work to play then don those headphones, you don’t want the sound to be a dead giveaway you’re daring to have fun at work!

The challenge when making the music for this game came with the criteria in the brief and the format the music was required in, meaning that there would only be 4 channels to play with. Usually when making electronic music you can pretty much have as many channels as you like (hardware permitting), so with four channels you are much more restricted with what you can do. The track had to be supplied in .mod format because this meant the game would then load much quicker and the quality of the music would be much better. An mp3 for example would usually be about 4mb, and the quality of it would be poor when compressed (down to about 1mb) to go in the game, whereas this track was around 40kb, needing no compression, therefore the quality is not compromised. The file format specification also meant that the software the track could be made in was limited. Milkytracker was chosen to make this particular track.

We really hope you take the time to go check the game out – let us know how you get on if you do! And of course do also let us know what you think of the music

The Queens Head

We would just like to tell you about a recent project we have been working on (apart from the neverending re-design of our website that is!) that has recently been completed. The brief was to design new branding, a flyer and menu for the re-opening of The Queens Head pub in Eye, Stradbroke, Suffolk. The new landlady had a colour scheme in mind for the interior decor of the pub and so the flyer and menu needed to reflect this. They were after a vintage feel for the new branding, and a friendly, family pub appearance that would appeal to both the locals and visitors to the village.

We decided on using this established looking serif font for the pub logo which will be used on signage, the website, literature, menus etc. It shows that the pub is a traditional pub, but we also think it’s a vast improvement on the font currently used on the sign for the pub.

The flyer was to promote the opening weekend, tell people a little bit about what would be on offer, welcome back the locals and tempt people to come try out the great food – something the pub has not done for a long time!

The menu was of course then completed in the same styling, we think the food all sounds great and will be travelling down to try it out for ourselves!

By all accounts we have heard that the pub had a GREAT opening night enjoyed by all, and we wish Jacqui and Dan the best of luck in their new endeavor. If any of our readers are in the area, do pop in and say hi!

8 Bit Rally Launch

A while ago our resident music producer, Poisoncut, was asked by the lovely guys at Photon Creations to make some 8-bit style tunes for their new game, 8 Bit Rally. We are really pleased to announce the game has now been released into the App Store so go download it and get racing! There have been some great comments and reviews so far on both the game and the  music, so if you do download and play it, do come let us know what you think.

If you don’t have an iphone then a mac and PC release should be coming soon but until then, if you would like to listen to the music Poisoncut made then visit the set on his Sound Cloud page.

Poisoncut is working on more tunes and another project at the moment so subscribe to this blog to get the latest info on that as soon as it’s available.

ErroZero Portfolio

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